An API standard for ride hailing services

As major cities like Chicago, NYC, Los Angeles, and Washington DC look to create their own smartphone apps for hailing taxis and riders have an ever increasing array of options for hailing a private car it’s time we look at creating an open standard so that hailing a taxi, private car, paratransit, or rideshare can be part of common infrastructure where apps can be used across cities and service providers. We’ve already seen this work with mass transit using standards like GTFS and with civic service requests using standards like Open311, let’s see if we can do this for catching a ride too.